#failure

We are meant to believe that giving up is a sign of weakness and a sign of failure, but I honestly believe it has its purpose. Knowing if and when to give up on some things and some people are very important. In the case of goals, we may be pursuing a business venture or some project for quite some time without making much headway and we believe that we must accomplish this, as anything less will be deemed a failure. We may have invested so much of ourselves into project or venture that we may have built an emotional attachment to it and may struggle to walk away from it. Knowing when to throw it in will save further heartache and help you to see more lucrative projects or ventures that may be beneficial. In the case of people, I don’t truly give up on them in the same sense but I do maintain my distance while sending positive thoughts their way. Sometimes we stick things out with people because we see the best in them, we see what they could possibly be and we see ourselves adding love and value to their lives to help them excel. If that situation starts to affect your happiness, your peace of mind and your ability to focus on your goals, I think that’s a good time to walk away. To be able to give something, you need to first of all have it in your possession and if you are not happy and centered, you are not capable of giving much of yourself. Knowing when to give up when you have most of the facts will help you build character and improve your decision making capabilities. Always remember, successful people make decisions quickly and are slow to change their minds while failures make their decisions slowly and change their minds quickly.

We are trained from childhood to associate negative emotions with failure. This leads to the desire to disassociate one’s self with that outcome that was deemed a failure and therefore lose incentive to examine the situation carefully in the end. The greatest lessons are truly learned from failure. The greatest people in history have talked about their failures and what they’ve learned from them. As Thomas Edison once said “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work”. John Lee Dumas of Entrepreneur On Fire always asks his entrepreneur guests about that great big failure and there is always a lesson to be learned from it. Those entrepreneurs have also attributed the success they have now to that great big failure they experienced. However, in the society we live in, the need to appear almost always perfect is causing us to miss out on life’s greatest lessons. We don’t push ourselves too hard or set goals that are seemingly unrealistic due to our fear of failure. To aid in my goal of getting out of my comfort zone for 2015, I’m setting goals that seem somewhat impossible. I need to test myself. It’s not only about the success of it but it’s about becoming comfortable with the concept of failure and understanding the true joy of it all. It’s about being able to look back on experiences and pull as much knowledge from it and use that to move forward in achieving more success. I am giving my all to accomplish my goals but knowing that the process is about learning and building character, makes me feel as if I’ve succeeded regardless of the outcome.

“I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed”…Michael Jordan